By the Author of Statesmen I Have Influenced; My Wonderful Life; The Souls' Awakener; The Elusive Diary, etc., etc.
One of my dearest friends in the early nineteen hundreds was Mr. Sadrock. I have known eleven Prime Ministers in my time and have assurances from all, signed and witnessed, that but for me and my vivacious encouragement they would never have pulled through; but with none was I on terms of such close communion as with Mr. Sadrock, who not only asked my advice on every occasion of importance, but spent many of his waking hours in finding rhymes to my name. Some of his four-lined couplets in my honour could not be either wittier or more charming as compliments.
He often averred that no one could amuse him as I did. He laughed once for half-an-hour on end when I said, "It takes a Liberal to be a Tory;" and on another occasion when I said, "The essence of Home Rule is, like charity, that it begins abroad." Nothing but the circumstance that he was already happily married prevented him from proposing to me.
Mr. Sadrock is now to many people only a name; but in his day he was a force to compare with which we have at this moment only one statesman and he is temporarily out of office.
The odd thing is that if the ordinary person were to be asked what Mr. Sadrock was famous for, he would probably reply, For his devotion to Homer and the Established Church. But the joke is that when I was with him in 1902 he was frivolous on both these subjects. It was, I remember, in the private room at the House of Commons set apart for Prime Ministers, to which, being notoriously so socially couth, I always had a private key—the only one ever given to a woman—and he was more than usually delightful.
This is what was said:—
Mr. Sadrock (mixing himself an egg nogg). Will you join me?
Myself. No, thank you. But I like to see you applying yourself to Subsidiary Studies to the Art of Butler.
Mr. Sadrock (roaring with laughter). That's very good. Some day you must put your best things into a book.
Myself. You bet.